Remains at Cambodian grave 'not Errol Flynn's son'

Thursday, July 01, 2010
AFP

PHNOM PENH — DNA tests have revealed that human remains found at a Cambodian grave are not those of the son of Hollywood film legend Errol Flynn as had been suspected, a US military official said Wednesday.

In March two amateur Western diggers presented a jaw and a femur bone to US officials, unearthed at a site in eastern Kampong Cham province, saying they believed the parts belonged to war photographer Sean Flynn.

The remains from the site, which some researchers believe is a mass grave for up to a dozen foreign journalists killed by Khmer Rouge fighters during Cambodia's war in the early 1970s, were sent for forensic analysis in Hawaii.

Officials from the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC) excavated the site in April and found more human remains.

But JPAC spokesman Lt. Colonel Wayne Perry told AFP Wednesday that tests showed the remains were not those of Flynn, who disappeared 40 years ago while covering Cambodia's war.

Perry said there was no match between DNA from the recovered remains and DNA samples they had on file from the Flynn family.

"The remains do not match any known Westerner for whom JPAC has a reference sample," he added.

Flynn, who worked as actor before covering the wars in Vietnam and Cambodia as a photographer, bore a striking resemblance to his father, who starred in swashbuckling roles in The Adventures of Robin Hood and Captain Blood.

The 28-year-old's fate has been a mystery since 1970 when he and fellow journalist Dana Stone were captured by communist Khmer Rouge guerrillas while on assignment in the area, and never heard from again.

Briton Keith Rotheram, one of the team that found the remains, said in March that they based their search on a local villager's claims to have seen regime soldiers kill a prisoner there matching Flynn's description in 1971.

At least 37 journalists were killed or disappeared covering the brutal 1970-75 conflict between the US-backed Lon Nol government and Khmer Rouge guerrillas supported by North Vietnamese fighters.

40 Years Later, Combing Cambodia for Missing Friends

Tim Page, a photographer, during the latest of many fruitless trips to find the remains of his friend Sean Flynn, who disappeared during the Vietnam War. (Photo: Seth Mydans)

June 18, 2010
By SETH MYDANS
The New York Times

PKHAR DOUNG, Cambodia — “Let’s rock and roll,” said Tim Page, once one of the wild and daring young photographers of the Vietnam War, strapping himself into the front seat of a four wheel drive van.

“Like Flynn and Stone, three intrepid journalists left Phnom Penh on a hot morning headed for Kampong Cham,” he said, narrating his departure recently with two colleagues.

He settled back for the long ride, past the town of Skun, known for its fried spiders, past hypnotic rows of rubber trees, out to this dusty village near the Mekong River where he believed the bones of two missing war photographers, Sean Flynn and Dana Stone, were buried.

It was not an unusual journey for Mr. Page. Now 66, he has been on this hunt for years, determined to find answers and to come to terms with the war that has dominated his life.

Just 40 years ago, the missing men had headed down an empty road with their cameras in search of Khmer Rouge guerrillas. They were never heard from again.

Their fate has become one of the enduring mysteries of the war, two young journalists — like movie adventurers — riding their motorbikes into no-man’s-land and losing a bet against fate.

Mr. Flynn, the dashing and glamorous son of the film star Errol Flynn, had in fact briefly been an actor, and he brought an aura with him to Vietnam that gave his disappearance at the age of 28 a mythic quality.

“Sean Flynn could look more incredibly beautiful than even his father, Errol, had 30 years before as Captain Blood,” wrote Michael Herr in his classic book about the war, “Dispatches.”

“But sometimes he looked more like Artaud coming out of some heavy heart-of-darkness trip, overloaded on the information, the input!”

Mr. Page had shared some of those journeys into darkness, and his visit to Pkhar Doung was the latest of many forays in what he calls “a 25-year madness” in search of the bones of the man he calls his brother.

Weeks earlier two bounty hunters had made a false claim to have found them, reviving interest in the disappearance and spurring American investigators to step up the search for the missing journalists.

“I don’t like the idea of his spirit out there tormented,” Mr. Page said, a wandering ghost that could only find rest, as many in Asia believe, after proper funeral rites. “There’s something spooky about being M.I.A.”

Mr. Page is also seeking a measure of peace for his own soul, scarred like his body from the traumas of combat, from nearly fatal wounds and the loss of friends, trying to put together what he calls “an enormous jigsaw puzzle, bits of sky, bits of earth.”

“I don’t think anybody who goes through anything like war ever comes out intact,” he said. “I suppose the closure of Sean’s fate also has to do with closure of the whole war experience.”

Theirs was an intimacy forged by shared danger and by what Mr. Page calls the magnetic pull of two only sons searching for a bond.

“We could have been brothers, and felt as though we were,” Mr. Page wrote in a memoir, “Derailed in Uncle Ho’s Victory Garden.” “We would sit for hours in the same room, hardly speaking yet in total communication, a vibration as intimate as between lovers.”

For Mr. Page a lonely intimacy has continued, and he hears what seems to be the voice of his friend from time to time, the voice of a tormented spirit.

“We have conversations in strange moments, and often enough to remind me of the presence of his spirit,” Mr. Page said on his recent drive to Pkhar Doung. “It’s there but not there, and you’re aware that there’s something somehow lurking, just out of reach.”

He said that as he drives past the rubber trees, whose rapid regular repeated rows create the illusion of some ghostly shifting world in the distance, he often hears his friend’s voice, “What are you doing, man? What are you doing, boy? What are you doing, mate?”

Mr. Flynn’s lost bones and wandering soul are not alone in Cambodia, where as many as a quarter of the population died in the late 1970s during the brutal rule of the Khmer Rouge. Many of their remains, like those of Mr. Flynn, are still unidentified in killing fields around the country.

Cambodia was a particularly dangerous place for foreign journalists during five years of war before the Khmer Rouge victory in 1975. At least 37 died or disappeared, including 15, along with Mr. Flynn, in a six-week period in April 1970.

After pursuing various theories and false trails, Mr. Page said he now believes that Mr. Flynn survived for a year after his disappearance and may have been killed by lethal injection at a field hospital here. On a visit last year, Mr. Page recovered some medical vials and turned them over for analysis to the American military office in Hawaii that seeks to recover the remains of missing soldiers.

This new visit to Pkhar Doung did little to solve the mystery. Since the bounty hunters had ravaged the site with a backhoe, the American military office, known by its acronym as JPAC, had sealed it off. Mr. Page was turned away by the local police.

In the future, he said, he planned to talk with nearby villagers who might have some memory of captive foreigners long ago and what became of them.

Even if he never does succeed, Mr. Page said his search had helped him honor both Mr. Flynn and other journalists who died or disappeared in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.

His pursuit has inspired a documentary, a new memorial to dead and missing journalists in Phnom Penh, journalism courses for local reporters and most significantly a book called “Requiem,” which includes the work of 135 photographers from all sides who died covering Indochina’s decades of war.

Mr. Page, who grew up in Britain, taught himself photography and covered the war as a freelancer from 1965 to 1969, sending pictures to major American and French publications including Time and Life, Look and Paris-Match.

He became known for his vivid combat pictures and also for the risks he took and the wounds he survived. At the time Mr. Flynn disappeared Mr. Page had suffered his most severe injuries, from a mine explosion that sent shrapnel into his brain and body.

He was pronounced dead on arrival at a hospital, he said, but surgeons revived him for a long and painful recovery. The thin borderline between life and death still seems to draw him.

“At the end of the day, the mysticism of it — living, not living — becomes a mystery,” he said, “and I don’t think we are ever privileged except on death’s doorstep to actually understand it.”

He hovers close, though, pouring his energies into his search for the unmarked grave of his friend, then sometimes finding comfort in the quiet of a cemetery.

“It’s always peaceful in a cemetery,” he said. “Everyone there has found rest. All the tribulations of life are over, and you return to the peace of nothingness.”

Remembering fallen reporters who covered Cambodia, Vietnam wars

Journalists observe a moment of silence to honor those killed while covering the Cambodia, Vietnam wars. Starting in the late 1960s, the communist Khmer Rouge waged a Vietnam-backed guerilla campaign that ultimately overthrew Cambodia's pro-West Prince Norodom Sihanouk. Millions died, including journalists covering the unfolding tragedy. (Chor Sokunthea/Reuters)

In April, former correspondents for the Cambodia, Vietnam wars held a reunion in Phnom Penh to remember their colleagues who died while reporting.

May 7, 2010
By Donald Kirk, Correspondent
The Christian Science Monitor
Wat Po, Cambodia

Memories of forays down empty roads from the capital of Phnom Penh flash by as we drive past sunbaked fields to the site where our colleagues were killed 40 years ago. It seems like the old days when correspondents ran those roads looking for war stories – only this time it is a bittersweet reunion, sharing memories of those we knew who went one roadblock too far and never returned.

A former CBS cameraman, Kurt Volkert, tells how two competing network correspondents died along with their crews covering a war that few understood. First George Syvertsen of CBS and producer Gerald Miller ran into an ambush and were gunned down along with their crew. Then, Welles Hangen of NBC and his crew were stopped and detained overnight before being brutally beaten to death.

Mr. Volkert had gone down a different highway that day but led the search for the bodies, including their excavation more than 20 years later.

He talks about the search as villagers gather around, smiling at their foreign visitors, seemingly oblivious to the memory of the scourge that swept the land a generation ago. “The area has changed completely,” he says, looking over the parched land. “The road has doubled in width. All the buildings are new.”

Construction goes on, forcing traffic into a single lane while a convoy of bullock carts competes for space.

All told, 37 foreign and Cambodian journalists died covering the war in Cambodia, a war that ended when the Khmer Rouge overthrew the US-backed regime in April 1975. No foreigners witnessed the subsequent, much worse, suffering endured under the Khmer Rouge until their fall in January 1979.

Today, foreigners are welcome. “The hospitality of the Cambodian people shines once again,” says a former correspondent, Carl Robinson. “It brings a lot of closure to our feelings after all these years.”

Remains of Errol Flynn's Son Spark Feud in Cambodia

Forty years have passed since Vietnam War correspondents Sean Flynn, left, and Dana Stone, right, rode bright red motorcycles into Communist-held territory in Cambodia on April 6, 1970 and were never seen again (Perry Deane Smith / MCT / Landov)

Sunday, May 02, 2010
By Brendan Brady, Phnom Penh
Time Magazine (USA)

Sean Flynn's towering stature and matinee-idol looks made him stand out during his years as a combat photographer in Indochina. The remains of his body, however, have proven more elusive. For years, official and unofficial efforts to recover the body of Hollywood swashbuckler icon Errol Flynn's son have come up empty-handed. Now, 40 years after his abduction, two men say that a gravesite they uncovered in the Cambodian countryside is likely to be his — and their claim has generated a flurry of excitement, skepticism and resentment.

In the late 1960s, American Sean Flynn abandoned a lukewarm film career to join a band of intrepid journalists documenting the civil wars in Vietnam and Cambodia. At first, Flynn drew international attention merely by virtue of being the even-more-handsome son of his movie-star father entering a combat zone. He and his colleagues' brazen lifestyle and daring work in the field became the stuff of legend and inspired a cast of colorful characters in war films and literature. More significantly, their photos, shot within the frenzied theater of combat, became pivotal in exposing Americans at home to the brutality and ambiguous profit of their military's involvement in the region. But the contribution was not without cost: At least 37 journalists were killed or went missing in Cambodia during its 1970-1975 war fought between the U.S.-backed military government and the North Vietnamese-supported Khmer Rouge.

Flynn was among them. In 1970 in Cambodia, Flynn, 28, was on assignment photographing for TIME with fellow American Dana Stone, who was shooting video for CBS. The pair left the capital Phnom Penh on motorbikes for the front line — pushing each other, the account goes, to get the ultimate story. They were never heard from again. Cambodia had already descended into full-blown civil war, but little was known yet about its unique breed of communist Khmer Rouge revolutionaries. The world would only find out later that the group had no appetite for compromise with their enemies or captured Western journalists.

Numerous reports about how and when Sean died have circulated over the years; the most widely repeated theory is that he was captured by Vietnamese communists, turned over to Khmer Rouge, and then held with other Western journalists before being crudely executed. The commercial value of the Sean Flynn story — a dashing, brash son flying headlong into war to stake out a reputation independent of his movie idol father — has not escaped Hollywood's eye. A film company has purchased the rights to Two of the Missing, an account of Flynn and Stone's saga. Heath Ledger was reportedly considering taking the role of Flynn before his own death in 2008.

Despite the fabled search for Flynn, the two men who believe they found his remains have not exactly been thanked for their work. Australian David MacMillan, 29, and Briton Keith Rotheram, 60, turned over a skull, teeth and bones to the U.S. embassy in Phnom Penh, which sent them on to the military office in Hawaii in charge of finding missing Americans from past conflicts. This outfit's initial assessment was that the bones may be those of a Southeast Asian, but further testing is underway. They have emphasized that amateur digs are discouraged because they can damage evidence, noting that in this case, "The remains are badly fragmented due to the manner in which they were recovered." The office's spokesperson stopped short of saying MacMillan and Rotheram had broken any laws, but contrary to standard protocol for exhumations, the pair used a mechanical digger with a serrated scoop to remove a layer of topsoil covering what they believed to be Sean's gravesite. The military described the area as "disturbed" when a team was sent there for a follow-up excavation, and said they found additional bone fragments in the hole of the previous dig.

MacMillan and Rotheram have shot back at critics, saying they conducted their search at the behest of Sean's half-sister Rory, who lives in North Carolina, and with the full knowledge of the authorities in the district where they dug. They also say they wouldn't have conducted the search themselves if the U.S. military had agreed to previous requests to excavate the site. "We didn't do anything that was haphazard," says MacMillan. "I've been studying all of [the military's] internal manuals for bone recovery. What we did was a combination of modern forensics mixed with the variables [presented by] the Cambodian jungle. We were doing the best we could with what we had."

But former war correspondents who knew Flynn have lambasted MacMillan and Rotheram, describing them as reckless bone hunters in search of fame and financial gain — the latter criticism gaining steam after the pair said they would only discuss the finding in detail to the highest bidder. Most vociferous has been Tim Page, the storied photographer who is said to be the inspiration behind Dennis Hopper's gonzo character in Apocalypse Now. Over the past couple of decades, Page, too, has conducted several searches for his old friend Flynn, whom he describes as having been "like a brother." In 1990, Page returned to Cambodia to complete a documentary called Danger on the Edge of Town, in which he tracked what he believed to be Flynn and Stone's movements as POWs.

Page says MacMillan and Rotheram may have "contaminated" the gravesites of other executed journalists whose remains lie in the same area. "The way they went about it is astonishing," he says. "Here you're looking at a crime scene. How were these people killed? How many people died here? You put a machine like that across an archeological site and it's a no-brainer you're going to destroy the area. Usually this is done by digging and sifting." (The follow-up military excavation did not find any secondary graves.)

Flynn's half-sister Rory has come to MacMillan and Rotheram's defense, saying she sanctioned their search and believes their motives were altruistic. She says she has been approached over the years by a number of would-be detectives, keen to offer their search and recovery services for a fee, or simply wanting to insinuate themselves into Sean's remarkable life story. "[David MacMillan] came to me with some very good information and documents and I jumped on board," Flynn says. "It's been 40 years and I was not going to let this opportunity go by. If protocol was broken a bit, too bad."

Yet after an initial round of optimistic stories from exuberant international press, local media has assumed a skeptical tone. Indeed, the two men's credentials and point of departure for carrying out the search — as cult fans of the rugged and striking Flynn men — hasn't inspired confidence. Rotheram has been a bar owner in Vietnam and Cambodia, and MacMillan describes himself as an artist, private investigator and bodyguard. MacMillan says the excavation was filmed and will be turned into a documentary that will show they "did it the right way." Their motivation, MacMillan says, was to "recover the soul" of Flynn — or whoever it was they unearthed.

Former War Correspondents Honor Fallen Reporters

Carle Robinson, center, from the U.S. prays for journalists who died while covering the Cambodian conflict during a Buddhist ceremony at a paddy rice of Kandoul, in Kampong Speu province. (Photo: AP)

Nearly 30 reporters, as well as other well-wishers, drove down National Road 3, to Wat Bo pagoda, in Kampong Speu province’s Borset district, where nine of their number were killed.

Kong Sothanarith, VOA
Phnom Penh, Cambodia
Monday, 26 April 2010

“We came from all corners of the earth, because it is very important for us to remember and honor our colleagues who died."

Forty years ago, National Road 3 was a highway to a war. The reporters and photographers who covered the Cambodian conflict in the 1970s would drive down the road, report, and return to the capital to file.

Last week, nearly four decades later, some of those journalists returned. They had come to honor their fallen comrades and remember the years they spent reporting the fall of Cambodia.

Nearly 30 reporters, as well as other well-wishers, drove down National Road 3, to Wat Bo pagoda, in Kampong Speu province’s Borset district, where nine of their number were killed. There, they paid their respects and planted a Bodhi tree.

“We came from all corners of the earth, because it is very important for us to remember and honor our colleagues who died,” Elizabeth Becker, who covered the conflict for the Washington Post and Newsweek, told VOA Khmer after a brief Buddhist ceremony.

The ceremony was the main event in a week of reunion activities, giving the aging war correspondents a chance to remember themselves, and Cambodia, at a younger time, when the American war in Vietnam was at full tilt, and when US bombings and Khmer Rouge fighting in Cambodia began to capture the public’s attention.

Thirty-seven Cambodian and foreign journalists were killed covering Cambodia’s civil war, which started when then-prince Sihanouk was ousted in a coup and ended only when the Khmer Rouge came to power. Of those, 21 died in the first chaotic months of a war that rapidly engulfed the country.

Four died in the ambush on National Road 3 on May 31, 1970, and five more were executed as prisoners in a ditch behind the pagoda.

“They were arrested at Pangkak Sey and detained for two nights in the school of the pagoda,” Sok Sambath, 71, who witnessed the captives, said after the ceremony. “And the second night they were killed.”

Sylvana Foa, who covered the war from 1970 to 1973, said killings were committed by the Khmer Rouge and by government troops alike.

“Both sides committed a lot of atrocities,” she said. “But of course once the Khmer Rouge were in power, their atrocities outnumbered everybody else’s.”

Following the trip to Wat Po, the journalists held a public memorial in Phnom Penh. Some of them visited the killing fields of Choeung Ek on the outskirts of town, or the museum at Tuol Sleng, the former torture center. Some said this would be their last trip to Cambodia.

“That we have come back is not a shock, but a sadness of course, and the sadness for our colleagues,” said Becker, who is now retired from the New York Times. “The Cambodians suffered so much, and I think the biggest sadness is [that] it is taking so long to be covered.”

U.S. Embassy in Cambodia Says Remains Are Not US Photographer

The surviving journalists and photographers who covered the war in Cambodia between 1970-75 gathered in Phnom Penh last week. They are seen here at a memorial to mark the 37 local and foreign colleagues who died during that time. (Photo: VOA - R. Carmichael)

Robert Carmichael, VOA
Phnom Penh 26 April 2010

Last month, amateur excavators unearthed human remains they claimed were those of U.S. war photographer Sean Flynn, who disappeared in Cambodia 40 years ago. But the U.S. Embassy in Phnom Penh says the remains are not Flynn's.

In 1970 war photographer Sean Flynn, the son of legendary Hollywood actor Errol Flynn, was in Cambodia covering the country's drift into civil war.

On April 6th that year he rode out of Phnom Penh with U.S. journalist Dana Stone. The two were not seen again, and were presumed captured and killed by the Khmer Rouge.

But last month two amateur excavators said they had found Flynn's remains in southeastern Cambodia.

On Monday, the U.S. Embassy in Phnom Penh said that military scientists tested the remains and found they are not Caucasian, and therefore could not be Flynn or Stone.

"And limited analysis suggests that they may be indigenous. Further testing is underway," embassy spokesman John Johnson said.

The excavation of the remains caused controversy. It came just weeks before a group of 27 journalists and photographers who covered Cambodia in the 1970s arrived here for a reunion, the first since Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge in April 1975.

Some of the journalists, many of whom knew Flynn and Stone, were angry at the way the excavators recovered the bones, especially their use of heavy earthmoving equipment.

The Embassy's Johnson says the use of a backhoe - a mechanical digger - caused problems.

"The remains are badly fragmented due to the manner in which they were recovered," Johnson said.

During their visit here last week, the group of returning journalists unveiled a memorial to the 37 Cambodian and foreign colleagues who died or disappeared during the war.

Among the names read out at the ceremony were those of Sean Flynn and Dana Stone, whose fates still remain unknown.

Flynn link to Cambodia bones rejected

Sean Flynn

Mon, 26 Apr 2010
Robert Carmichael, Cambodia
ABC Radio Australia

The American embassy in Phnom Penh says human remains uncovered in Cambodia last month are unlikely to be those of missing war photographer Sean Flynn.

The statement conflicts with claims by people who dug up the remains.

On Thursday last week, 27 journalists and photographers who covered the Cambodian war of the early 1970s gathered in Phnom Penh for their first reunion since the Khmer Rouge took over the country in 1975.

Among their reasons for returning was to hold a ceremony marking the deaths of 37 of their colleagues between 1970 and 1975.

Perhaps the best-known of those who disappeared was Flynn, a US war photographer, and son of Australian-born Hollywood star Errol Flynn.

Sean Flynn disappeared 40 years ago this month, along with US colleague Dana Stone.

It is thought they were captured and eventually killed by the Khmer Rouge.

Last month two amateur bone-hunters made world headlines when they claimed they had found Flynn's remains.

But the US embassy in Phnom Penh scotched that claim on Monday.

Embassy spokesman John Johnson said the US government's missing-in-action (MIA) team has tested human remains handed over by the two men and found they are not of Caucasian origin.

The announcement came as the group of reunited journalists headed to Vietnam for the 35th anniversary of the fall of Saigon.

Human remains unlikely to be missing US war photographer Sean Flynn

Mon, 26 Apr 2010
DPA

Phnom Penh - Human remains unearthed under controversial circumstances in Cambodia last month are not thought to be those of Sean Flynn, the son of Hollywood icon Errol Flynn and a US war photographer who disappeared in Cambodia 40 years ago, the US embassy in Phnom Penh said Monday.

Spokesman John Johnson said an analysis undertaken by the Hawaii-based Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, whose task is to determine the fate of US military personnel who are listed as prisoners of war or missing in action, suggested the remains "may be indigenous."

"Further testing is under way," Johnson said, adding that the remains "are badly fragmented due to the manner in which they were recovered."

The remains were dug up by Australian Dave MacMillan, 29, and Briton Keith Rotheram, 60, in the south-eastern Cambodian province of Kampong Cham and eventually handed over in late March to the US embassy.

The pair made world news after claiming they had found Flynn's remains. They admitted to using heavy earthmoving equipment to conduct part of the dig, a technique that was widely criticized because it damaged the site that the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command subsequently investigated.

MacMillan told dpa in March that the team had "used some not-so-obvious techniques you wouldn't see in a forensics handbook" during its three-month dig.

Neither MacMillan nor Rotheram could be reached for comment Monday.

Flynn was in Cambodia on assignment for Time magazine covering its civil war when he and fellow American Dana Stone, a photojournalist with CBS News, went missing on April 6, 1970, after they drove out of Phnom Penh on the main road to Vietnam.

Flynn was 28 and Stone was 31 when they disappeared, and neither was heard from again. It is thought they were kept alive for a year before being killed, either by the Khmer Rouge or by Vietnamese communist forces.

The announcement by the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command followed the conclusion last week of the first Phnom Penh reunion of journalists and photographers who covered the war in Cambodia in the early 1970s.

Flynn and Stone were among at least 37 foreign and local journalists who died or disappeared while covering the Cambodia conflict, which ended on April 17, 1975, when Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge forces took Phnom Penh and instituted their four-year-long genocidal regime known as Democratic Kampuchea.

Around 2 million Cambodians are thought to have died under the Khmer Rouge. A UN-Cambodian court in Phnom Penh has been established to try the movement's surviving leaders.

Cambodian war correspondents mourn ex-colleagues

In this photo taken on Thursday April 22, 2010, Cambodian and foreigner correspondents pay respects during a ground-breaking ceremony for a memorial to journalists killed duirng the Cambodian conflict, at Kandoul, about 70 kilometers (43 miles) south of Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Two dozen aging colleagues on Thursday trekked to this village to mourn and remember dozens of reporters, photographers and cameramen who died covering the five-year war that ended in 1975 with the takeover by the brutal Khmer Rouge. (AP Photo/Heng Sinith)
In this photo taken on Thursday April 22, 2010, Cambodian Linda Chin, center, lays down a bouquet of flowers near a portrait of her former husband, Chhim Sarat, during a ground-breaking ceremony for a memorial to journalists killed duirng the Cambodian conflict, at Kandoul, about 70 kilometers (43 miles) south of Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Chin's husband worked for the United Press International in early 1970s. Two dozen aging colleagues on Thursday trekked to this village to mourn and remember dozens of reporters, photographers and cameramen who died covering the five-year war that ended in 1975 with the takeover by the brutal Khmer Rouge. (AP Photo/Heng Sinith)

Saturday, April 24, 2010
By MIKE ECKEL and SOPHENG CHEANG (AP)

KANDOUL, Cambodia — The bodies were dumped in a shallow grave amid the untilled earth of rice paddies: five journalists who had been ambushed by Khmer Rouge and Viet Cong guerrillas on May 31, 1970.

Om Pao, then 12, remembers the stench of decay for days after. He helped his father heap more earth on top of the remains to keep the smell down, the pigs out and the bodies from floating away.

In all, nine journalists — American, Indian, Japanese, French and Cambodian — were attacked that day near this dusty village south of the capital, Phnom Penh. All are believed to have been killed. It was one of the deadliest incidents for reporters in the wars in Vietnam and Cambodia, in a year that remains one of the deadliest anywhere for journalists.

This week, 40 years later, two dozen aging colleagues trekked to Kandoul to mourn and remember. They honored the dozens of reporters, photographers and cameramen who died covering the five-year war, which ended in 1975 with the takeover by the brutal Khmer Rouge.

"It's not only sadness for our colleagues, but also for our Cambodian friends," said Elizabeth Becker, who covered the war for The Washington Post, "but the biggest sadness is that it's taken so long for this country to recover."

Impoverished Cambodia, already roiled by the fighting in neighboring Vietnam, plunged into open war in March 1970 when Gen. Lon Nol overthrew Prince Norodom Sihanouk and seized power in a CIA-backed coup.

Two months later, as Lon Nol's forces battled Khmer Rouge insurgents and their Vietnamese allies, a six-man crew from CBS News was ambushed on the morning of May 31 as the team drove south of Phnom Penh. Three men from NBC News, rushing after their competitors, were also captured.

According to former CBS cameraman Kurt Volkert, who compiled a detailed reconstruction based on witness accounts, four of the CBS employees were killed instantly. The five others are believed to have been taken to Kandoul in the days after and executed. They had their hands bound and possibly were clubbed to death.

In 1992, Volkert helped a U.S. military forensics team locate the grave just outside Kandoul. Four bodies were recovered and identified as the three NBC employees and one from CBS. The fifth body was never found.

In all, more than three dozen foreign and Cambodian journalists were killed or listed as missing during the 1970-75 war. As many as 26 were killed in the war's first year, according to tallies compiled by former Associated Press correspondents.

Earlier this year, amateur searchers digging northeast of Phnom Penh unearthed what they believe to be the remains of war photographer Sean Flynn — son of Hollywood star Errol Flynn. Sean Flynn went missing nearly two months before the U.S. television crews were ambushed.

After the Khmer Rouge took over in April 1975, dozens of other Cambodian journalists — mainly freelancers for foreign media — were executed or simply disappeared.

On Thursday, reporters, photographers and cameramen who covered Cambodia's upheaval joined throngs of curious villagers, huddling from the scorching heat under an orange and yellow tent in the middle of a rice paddy.

The smell of burning incense and the chants of Buddhist monks mixed with the sound of passing ox carts. Several visitors wept as the names of the dead reporters were read aloud. Children, naked and barefoot, begged for handouts, sipped coconut juice being sold by a vendor and splashed in the nearby puddle where the four bodies had been exhumed in 1992.

"We remember those who have died seeking both truth and reality in Cambodia," said Chhang Song, the minister of information in the Lon Nol government who worked closely with many of the reporters and helped organize the reunion.

Om Pao, whose father's paddy was just yards away from the grave in 1970, said: "To hold a Buddhist ceremony like today is good for dead people, to show the gratitude to the dead and to offer their souls a chance to rest in peace."

Former AP correspondent Carl Robinson said covering Cambodia's turmoil was much more dangerous than Vietnam. Journalists were more often on their own, without the protection of the U.S. military. And, he added, he was troubled by the U.S. role in Cambodia.

"It was nightmarish to cover it all," he said. "It's too hard to look back upon. The whole thing had been a disaster. I left feeling guilty and bitter, as a reporter, as an American, it was just shameful and the Cambodians suffered."

For Jeff Williams, a former correspondent for AP and CBS, the trip was a chance to remember the collegiality of the foreign press corps at the time.

"I don't believe in closure. Maybe it's just me, but nothing ever closes," he said. "You just move ahead."

Foreign correspondents of Cambodia civil war hold bittersweet reunion

Journalists gather in Phnom Penh 35 years after the conflict to remember their wild nights and fallen comrades.

April 23, 2010
By Mark Magnier and Brendan Brady, Los Angeles Times
Reporting from Phnom Penh, Cambodia

The first reunion of foreign correspondents who covered the 1970-75 Cambodian civil war — and perhaps the last, given the advanced ages of many — ended Friday, 40 years after the conflict began. "A bunch of ‘Jurassic Park' journos," one reporter said. "'Hurt Locker' meets ‘Animal House,'" another said.

The self-deprecating humor belied a period that was deceptively deadly for journalists. Although the Cambodia war received far less attention than its counterpart in neighboring Vietnam, 36 correspondents working for foreign news operations were killed or reported missing during the conflict, compared with 33 in Vietnam, according to the Associated Press.

The toll included nine ambushed and killed by the Khmer Rouge on a single day in May 1970.

"It was wonderful to get together," said Chhang Song, the last information minister in the government overthrown by the Khmer Rouge. "Happy and bittersweet. People cried recalling their old colleagues who died."

Before he became information minister, Song, who helped organize this week's event in the capital, Phnom Penh, worked for military spokesman Col. Am Rong. That's a name that still causes great mirth among the reporters. The briefings were rather vague in those years, in part because the military spokesmen often had little idea what was really going on in the field. That forced correspondents to head down dangerous roads to find out for themselves, said James Pringle, a former correspondent for Reuters, Newsweek and the Sunday Times of London.

The two dozen or so journalists who attended this week's three-day conclave, most now in their 60s and 70s, traveled from London; New York; Bangkok, Thailand; and Sydney, Australia; among other places, with some returning to the country for the first time since they left in a hurry in 1975, as documented in the 1984 film "The Killing Fields."

For many correspondents working during that period, evenings were spent knocking back stiff drinks around the pool of the colonial Le Royal hotel or frequenting Phnom Penh's opium dens to unwind.

Releasing stress was often de rigueur, given that the front lines in the war were even more vague than in Vietnam, the rules of engagement less defined, and there were no U.S. helicopters to extract distressed reporters from harm's way.

Of the 36 international and Cambodian journalists, photographers and cameramen killed or missing during the period — not counting an untold number of Cambodian freelancers killed by the Khmer Rouge after 1975 — 25 perished in the first six months of combat between Khmer Rouge communists and the government's U.S.-backed forces.

Yet for those covering the conflict, the charm of Phnom Penh, known then as the "pearl" of Southeast Asia, made this smaller conflict the preferred beat of many hardened correspondents who split their time between the Cambodian and Vietnamese wars.

Many who lived had close calls.

"I looked up and could see the bombs falling, and I thought, OK, adios, but they ended up 200 meters beyond me," said Jeff Williams, who worked for the Associated Press and later CBS.

At the time of the 1970 right-wing coup that ousted Norodom Sihanouk as head of state and led to the civil war, U.S. journalists were barred from Cambodia. Williams sneaked into the country posing as a professor and became the only American to cover the overthrow, well before the days of satellite phones and near-instant communication.

"I have an exclusive, and I can't get it out," Williams said. "It took two days to get it out."

With telephones and other communication shut down, he eventually arranged for a car to meet him at the border and ferry the film and copy back to a newsroom.

This week actor George Hamilton joined the journalists to pay homage to his childhood friend Sean Flynn; the photojournalist, son of Hollywood icon Errol Flynn, was captured and killed in Cambodia. And Fanny Ferrato and Katherine Holden, the daughters of Philip Jones Griffiths, came to spread their father's ashes. The legendary photographer died of cancer in 2008.

In the 1970s, the correspondents' indulgence after sundown contrasted with their anxiety during the day. After a dip in the pool and a meal at one of the city's finer French restaurants, the journalists sometimes capped their evenings with a visit to Madame Chantal's opium den, where diplomats and some of the local elite also congregated, Pringle said

"We would take off our clothes and put on a sarong, and we would just lie there and chat," he recalled. "After you had a pipe, the tension would abate and the B-52 strikes that you'd hear in the distance would grow fainter and fainter."

mark.magnier@latimes.com
Brady is a special correspondent.

Former War Correspondents Reunite in Cambodia

Report by Uon Chhin, RFA

Cambodian war correspondents mourn ex-colleagues

In this photo taken on Thursday, April 22, 2010, former foreign correspondents of war in Cambodia walk carefully at a paddy field of Kandoul, Kampong Speu province, about 70 kilometers (43 miles) south of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, for their visit to the grave site. Two dozen aging colleagues trekked to this village to mourn and remember Thursday. And they honored the dozens of reporters, photographers and cameramen who died covering the five-year war that ended in 1975 with the takeover by the brutal Khmer Rouge. (AP Photo/Heng Sinith)

Friday, April 23, 2010
By MIKE ECKEL and SOPHENG CHEANG (AP)

KANDOUL, Cambodia — The bodies were dumped in a shallow grave amid the untilled earth of rice paddies: five journalists who had been ambushed by Khmer Rouge and Viet Cong guerrillas on May 31, 1970.

Om Pao, then 12, remembers the stench of decay for days after. He helped his father heap more earth on top of the remains to keep the smell down, the pigs out and the bodies from floating away.

In all, nine journalists — American, Indian, Japanese, French and Cambodian — were attacked that day near this dusty village south of the capital, Phnom Penh. All are believed to have been killed. It was one of the deadliest incidents for reporters in the wars in Vietnam and Cambodia, in a year that remains one of the deadliest anywhere for journalists.

This week, 40 years later, two dozen aging colleagues trekked to Kandoul to mourn and remember. They honored the dozens of reporters, photographers and cameramen who died covering the five-year war, which ended in 1975 with the takeover by the brutal Khmer Rouge.

"It's not only sadness for our colleagues, but also for our Cambodian friends," said Elizabeth Becker, who covered the war for The Washington Post, "but the biggest sadness is that it's taken so long for this country to recover."

Impoverished Cambodia, already roiled by the fighting in neighboring Vietnam, plunged into open war in March 1970 when Gen. Lon Nol overthrew Prince Norodom Sihanouk and seized power in a CIA-backed coup.

Two months later, as Lon Nol's forces battled Khmer Rouge insurgents and their Vietnamese allies, a six-man crew from CBS News was ambushed on the morning of May 31 as the team drove south of Phnom Penh, looking for a battle. Three men from NBC News, rushing after their competitors, were also captured.

According to former CBS cameraman Kurt Volkert, who compiled a detailed reconstruction based on witness accounts, four of the CBS employees were killed instantly. The five others are believed to have been taken to Kandoul in the days after and executed. They had their hands bound and possibly were clubbed to death.

In 1992, Volkert helped a U.S. military forensics team locate the grave just outside Kandoul. Four bodies were recovered and identified as the three NBC employees and one from CBS. The fifth body was never found.

In all, more than three dozen foreign and Cambodian journalists were killed or listed as missing during the 1970-75 war. As many as 26 were killed in the war's first year, according to tallies compiled by former Associated Press correspondents.

Earlier this year, amateur searchers digging northeast of Phnom Penh unearthed what they believe to be the remains of war photographer Sean Flynn — son of Hollywood star Errol Flynn. Sean Flynn went missing nearly two months before the U.S. television crews were ambushed.

After the Khmer Rouge took over in April 1975, dozens of other Cambodian journalists — mainly freelancers for foreign media — were executed or simply disappeared.

On Thursday, reporters, photographers and cameramen who covered Cambodia's upheaval joined throngs of curious villagers, huddling from the scorching heat under an orange and yellow tent in the middle of a rice paddy.

The smell of burning incense and the chants of Buddhist monks mixed with the sound of passing ox carts. Several visitors wept as the names of the dead reporters were read aloud. Children, naked and barefoot, begged for handouts, sipped coconut juice being sold by a vendor and splashed in the nearby puddle where the four bodies had been exhumed in 1992.

"We remember those who have died seeking both truth and reality in Cambodia," said Chhang Song, the minister of information in the Lon Nol government who worked closely with many of the reporters and helped organize the reunion.

Om Pao, whose father's paddy was just yards away from the grave in 1970, said: "To hold a Buddhist ceremony like today is good for dead people, to show the gratitude to the dead and to offer their souls a chance to rest in peace."

Former AP correspondent Carl Robinson said covering Cambodia's turmoil was much more dangerous than Vietnam. Journalists were more often on their own, without the protection of the U.S. military. And, he added, he was troubled by the U.S. role in Cambodia.

"It was nightmarish to cover it all," he said. "It's too hard to look back upon. The whole thing had been a disaster. I left feeling guilty and bitter, as a reporter, as an American, it was just shameful and the Cambodians suffered."

For Jeff Williams, a former correspondent for AP and CBS, the trip was a chance to remember the collegiality of the foreign press corps at the time.

"I don't believe in closure. Maybe it's just me, but nothing ever closes," he said. "You just move ahead."

Former foreign war reporters revisit Cambodia

Former Washington Post correspondent Elizabeth Becker (L) consoles former staff member of Kyodo News, Yoko Ishiyama, as she prays at a Buddhist ceremony at Po Kandal village in Kampong Speu province 65 km (40 miles) west of Phnom Penh April 22, 2010, in memory of her husband, Koki Ishiyama, a former correspondent for Kyodo, who was killed covering the Cambodian civil war in 1973. About 40 retired journalists gathered on Thursday to officially commemorate more than 50 correspondents from Japan, France, the U.S., Cambodia, Australia, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, India and Laos, who were killed while covering the conflict, which lasted from 1970-1975. REUTERS/Chor Sokunthea
Carle Robinson (L), former Associated Press correspondent prays at a Buddhist ceremony at Po Kandal village in Kampong Speu province 65 km (40 miles) west of Phnom Penh April 22, 2010. About 40 retired journalists gathered on Thursday to officially commemorate more than 50 correspondents from Japan, France, the U.S., Cambodia, Australia, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, India and Laos, who were killed while covering the Cambodian civil war, which lasted from 1970-1975. REUTERS/Chor Sokunthea
Former Time-Life photographer Tim Page and other foreign correspondents pray at a Buddhist ceremony at Po Kandal village in Kampong Speu province 65 km (40 miles) west of Phnom Penh April 22, 2010. About 40 retired journalists gathered on Thursday to officially commemorate more than 50 correspondents from Japan, France, the U.S., Cambodia, Australia, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, India and Laos, who were killed while covering the Cambodian civil war, which lasted from 1970-1975. REUTERS/Chor Sokunthea
Former foreign correspondents observe a moment of silence in front of a grave on a rice field at a Buddhist ceremony at Po Kandal village in Kampong Speu province 65 km (40 miles) west of Phnom Penh April 22, 2010 . About 40 retired journalists gathered on Thursday to officially commemorate more than 50 correspondents from Japan, France, the U.S., Cambodia, Australia, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, India and Laos, who were killed while covering the Cambodian civil war, which lasted from 1970-1975. REUTERS/Chor Sokunthea
Former Washington Post correspondent Elizabeth Becker (L) reads a list of killed foreign correspondents as former staff member of Kyodo News, Yoko Ishiyama (R), weeps at a Buddhist ceremony at Po Kandal village in Kampong Speu province 65 km (40 miles) west of Phnom Penh April 22, 2010. The list includes Yoko Ishiyama's husband, Koki Ishiyama, a former correspondent for Kyodo, who was killed covering the Cambodian civil war in 1973. About 40 retired journalists gathered on Thursday to officially commemorate more than 50 correspondents from Japan, France, the U.S., Cambodia, Australia, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, India and Laos, who were killed while covering the conflict, which lasted from 1970-1975. REUTERS/Chor Sokunthea
Former Time-Life photographer Tim Page prays at a Buddhist ceremony at Po Kandal village in Kampong Speu province 65 km (40 miles) west of Phnom Penh April 22, 2010. About 40 retired journalists gathered on Thursday to officially commemorate more than 50 correspondents from Japan, France, the U.S., Cambodia, Australia, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, India and Laos, who were killed while covering the Cambodian civil war, which lasted from 1970-1975. REUTERS/Chor Sokunthea
Sylvana Foa (R), two-time nominee for the Pulitzer Price, former Newsweek and United Press International (UPI) correspondent and currently a journalism teacher at New York University's Tel Aviv campus and former staff member of Kyodo News, Yoko Ishiyama (L), place a flower at the dedication of memorial of journalists in Phnom Penh April 22, 2010. Yoko Ishiyama's husband, Koki Ishiyama, a former correspondent for Kyodo, was killed covering the Cambodian civil war in 1973. About 40 retired journalists gathered on Thursday to officially commemorate more than 50 correspondents from Japan, France, the U.S., Cambodia, Australia, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, India and Laos, who were killed while covering the conflict, which lasted from 1970-1975. REUTERS/Chor Sokunthea
Carl Robinson (R), former Associated Press correspondent and Chhang Song , former Khmer minister of information, stand near the sign dedicated to the memory of Cambodian and foreign journalists killed or missing during the Cambodian civil war April 22, 2010. About 40 retired journalists gathered on Thursday to officially commemorate more than 50 correspondents from Japan, France, the U.S., Cambodia, Australia, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, India and Laos, who were killed while covering the conflict, which lasted from 1970-1975. REUTERS/Chor Sokunthea

Foreign war reporters arrived in Cambodia

Foreign and local reporters taking notes in Cambodia during the 70s (Photo: DC-Cam)

20 April 2010
By Leang Delux
Radio France Internationale
Translated from Khmer by Socheata

As planned, foreign reporters who survived the war in Cambodia at the beginning of the 70s have returned back to Cambodia to commemorate their colleagues who died or disappeared between 1970 and 1975.

27 veteran reporters have arrived in Cambodia. They will be greeted by Khieu Kanharith, the minister of Information during a dinner meeting. Now, all these reporters are in their 60s or older. The majority of them are US citizens, followed by Australians, and Brits. All of them are reporters for major news agencies in the world, such as AP, Reuters, UPI, the Washington Post, Newsweek etc…

This gathering will span over a period of 4 days, starting form Tuesday afternoon. They will meet with Cambodian reporters during dinner. There will be 3 main events that will take place on Thursday 22 April: in the morning, they will be taken to Wat Po Pagoda, located in Borset district, Kampong Speu province. The Wat Po area was the location where 9 reporters were ambushed and killed by Pol Pot soldiers on 31 May 1970. Therefore, at this pagoda, the reporters will pay respect to the memory of their fallen colleagues there.

In the afternoon of the same day, they will return back to Phnom Penh to hold the second major event: paying respect to the memory of all reporters who died or disappeared between 1970 and 1975. This major event will be held at the park located in front of Le Royal Hotel where a stupa will be built to commemorate these reporters. The stupa will be built there because these reporters used to meet each other at that location in the beginning of the 70s.

The 3rd major event will take place in the evening of 22 April: it will be discussion forum among the reporters’ community and the exposition of old photos showing the activities of reporters during the 70s war.

Furthermore, for the majority of reporters who never returned back to Cambodia after their stint in the 70s, they will be taken to visit the Tuol Sleng museum, the Choeung Ek memorial and the royal palace.

Regarding the goal of the meeting with these foreign reporters, Khieu Kanharith said that it is only held to allow the opportunity for current reporters to meet with old reporters and to connect with each other. However, it will also allow these old reporters to have the opportunity to see Cambodia’s current situation which is quite different from what it used to be in the 70s.

US MIA searchers find human remains in Cambodia

Tuesday, April 13
AP

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia – A U.S. government search team has found fragments of human remains at what could be the grave site of photographer Sean Flynn, son of Hollywood star Errol Flynn, who disappeared during the Vietnam War 40 years ago.

A spokesman for the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command said Monday that at least a few shards from a skull were found by a seven-member recovery team last week.

Lt. Colonel Wayne Perry said the team has been digging at the same site where Australian Dave MacMillan and Briton Keith Rotheram unearthed remains last month, but are exploring deeper and over a wider area than the amateur sleuths did.

At least 37 journalists died or disappeared in Cambodia in 1970-75, in a conflict that pitted a U.S.-backed government against the communist Khmer Rouge.

Efforts to recover bodies of missing journalists in Cambodia spark ire

In 1970, 2 war reporters, one the son of a famed actor, set out on a story and vanished. A new effort to recover their remains has unleashed a storm.

Sunday, 04.11.10
BY PERRY DEANE YOUNG
McClatchy News Service (USA)

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. -- Forty years have passed since my close friends Dana Stone and Sean Flynn rode bright red motorcycles into Communist-held territory in Cambodia on April 6, 1970, and were never seen again. Dana was a cameraman on assignment with CBS; Flynn was freelancing for Time magazine.

Now, suddenly, almost out of the oblivion of time, their names are back in the news with reports from Cambodia that Flynn's remains may have been found.

I emphasize that word ``may'' because there's no evidence whatsoever that the remains are Flynn's. He would have hated this kind of sensationalism. The son and spitting image of actor Errol Flynn, Sean loathed the superficial celebrity that went with a name that was only partly his own.

Stone, the merry prankster among the press corps in Vietnam, would be delighted to see his name in the papers and would have a wickedly funny remark about it all that cut right through the hype.

An international group of journalists has been outraged in recent days, not with the finding, but with the manner in which the search was conducted. Two ``bounty hunters,'' as the London tabloids described them, took a backhoe to a site where as many as 12 Westerners were thought to have been buried. Neither of them had any credentials as archaeologists or forensic researchers. One is an Australian adventurer; the other is a British-born bar owner in Cambodia.

Their ``finding'' came days before the ``first and last reunion'' of the aging correspondents who covered the dreadful wars of the 1970s in Cambodia. The sponsors billed it as the last because they said most of us were so old that we'd never be able to get there again.

INTO THE UNKNOWN

Vietnam War correspondents Flynn, Stone, Stone's wife Louise and I had been part of the lively young group of friends celebrated in Michael Herr's Dispatches and in my own book, Two of the Missing, which I initially wrote as a magazine article to help publicize their plight as civilian POWs.

On that fateful day, April 6, 1970, other reporters overheard Flynn and Stone arguing just before they left the little village of Chi Pou.

``I've got a wife in the hotel back in Phnom Penh, and I haven't spent all this time here to get myself captured,'' Stone said.

``I know it's dangerous,'' Flynn said. ``That's what makes it a good story.''

Flynn grabbed Stone's keys and tossed them into a mud puddle. Stone retrieved his keys and quickly joined him.

In a stunning picture taken as they headed out, Flynn is dressed in a floppy hat, T-shirt, cut-off jeans, flip-flops and, of course, the latest shades from Paris. Right to that last adventure, he remained ever the casual one about the reckless daring he was known for as a photographer in Vietnam.

Lacking Flynn's glamorous looks, Stone was if anything an even more memorable character. He could never sit still long enough for college, but he was an intellectual in that he was always trying to figure out what he was witnessing and what his pictures really meant. He could recite A.E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad from memory.

If you were his friend, you knew to expect a lightning-quick thumb in your perfectly cooked, over-easy eggs or mashed potatoes, or a lighted trail of lighter fluid up to your nose as you lay sleeping.

That morning 40 years ago, I got a call from my former colleague, Tom Cheatham, at UPI. ``Just wanted you to know they think Flynn and Stone have been captured, but don't worry . . .''

``Don't worry? I wish to hell I were with them.''

Even I was shocked by my response. In truth, I knew at the time that nothing would ever measure up to the very special camaraderie we'd shared in Vietnam . . . and nothing ever has. I remember coming back to the world, standing with a friend in a Greenwich Village jazz club and saying: ``I feel like my life is all in the past.''

I was 29 years old.

THE SEARCHES BEGIN

The search for Flynn and Stone began almost immediately after they were captured. Dana's wife, Louise, may have seemed like a mousy little thing to some, but she instantly became a tiger determined to find her ``Danie.''

In 1970, she went to the site where these bones were just found after she interviewed a captured Khmer Rouge soldier who reported seeing Westerners who looked like Flynn and Stone.

She hired a Dutch adventurer to cross into communist lines to look for them; she talked two young men who'd hijacked an American munitions ship into escaping house arrest in Phnom Penh and going over to the communists.

She knew that her Dana would come back; he always had. Many years later, she would die a terrible wasting death from multiple sclerosis, still clinging to that hope.

Walter Cronkite headed up an international group of journalists to negotiate with the communists and try to convince them that the Westerners were journalists, not combatants.

The group hired Zalin Grant, a former Army intelligence officer and Time reporter, to interview captured communist soldiers. The consensus was that Flynn and Stone might have lived for as long as six months, but probably no longer. They probably were executed out of expediency.

In recent years, Flynn's closest friend, legendary war photographer Tim Page, has picked up the search for the remains of Flynn and others. In a British documentary, Danger on the Edge of Town, Tim found some remains that he thought were Flynn's. They turned out to belong to one of the mutineers.

At the time, I was appalled by Page's digging and coming out with what may have been pieces of our old Saigon roommate. Page may need that kind of closure, but I don't. Still, at least Page did what he did with great respect, even reverence. I shared his outrage over the desecration caused by these recent headline seekers.

I want to remember Flynn and Stone as they're preserved in that last picture, alive and young and setting off on one more adventure. Like Housman's To an Athlete Dying Young, they won't live to wear out their laurels, and their names won't die before they do.

Still, at least Page did what he did with great respect, even reverence. I shared his outrage over the desecration caused by these recent headline seekers, and I must say, I was delighted to hear the report back from a trip Page took to the burial site on April 4 with New York Times reporter Seth Mydans.

``Good news and bad news,'' Mydans e-mailed me. They made the trip, all right, he said, but they were denied access. At last, the site has been sealed off by JPAC, the Joint POW-MIA Accounting Command.

Maybe now my friends' remains will be properly found and identified, and they'll be safe from scavengers. I have no interest in seeing their remains, however. I'll hold on to to that last picture.

Perry Deane Young is the author of three plays and nine books, including ``Two of the Missing: Remembering Sean Flynn and Dana Stone.''

Remains of Journalists May Have Surfaced in Cambodia

In this 1968 file photo, Sean Flynn (R) is seen during operations near Ha Thanh, some 325 miles from Saigon, in South Vietnam (Photo: AP)

Phnom Penh 06 April 2010
Robert Carmichael, VOA

Exactly 40 years ago, the war photographer Sean Flynn rode out of Phnom Penh on a motorbike, accompanied by photojournalist Dana Stone. They disappeared and have not been heard from since. But human remains uncovered in a remote part of Cambodia last month might hold a clue about what happened.

Sean Flynn and Dana Stone were in Cambodia, covering the country's drift into civil war. The two were well known journalists in the region. Flynn was the son of legendary Hollywood actor Errol Flynn.

They disappeared on April 6, 1970, and are believed to have been captured by Vietnamese troops and handed over to the Khmer Rouge, who eventually killed them.

Renowned British war photographer Tim Page, a close friend, has spent a large part of the past two decades searching for Flynn's remains.

His research led him to a site in eastern Cambodia where he believes Flynn, Stone and perhaps 10 other journalists may have been held for more than a year before being executed.

Last month two Australians got to the site and partially dug it up. They say they found Flynn's remains, and have handed them over to U.S. military scientists to be identified.

However, Page says American scientists should go to the site and professionally excavate it. "I'm hoping this is going to somehow oblige them to go into these zones and do the good thing," he said.

Local news reports indicate a U.S. team will head to the site later this month.

That would coincide with the arrival in Phnom Penh of many of the journalists who covered the region in the late 1960s and 1970s, visiting to mark 35th anniversary of the fall of Phnom Penh to the Khmer Rouge government.

"It would be nice to think that we might get some closure this year on some of our compadres. If it proves to be Sean or Dana, we've kicked a goal. I'm not keeping my hopes up," Page stated.

During their time here the journalists will unveil a memorial to the 37 Cambodian and foreign journalists who died or disappeared during the war.

Among the names on the memorial will be Sean Flynn and Dana Stone.

Page says that, in war, friends become closer even than family. It is that camaraderie that has provided him with the motivation to seek out the final resting place of his old friend.

Embassy: Remains could belong to Errol Flynn's son

Monday, March 29, 2010
By SOPHENG CHEANG (AP)

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — Forensic tests will be conducted on what two searchers believe are the remains of photographer Sean Flynn, son of Hollywood star Errol Flynn, who disappeared during the Cambodian War 40 years ago, the U.S. Embassy said Monday.

At least 37 journalists were killed or are listed as missing from the 1970-75 war, which pitted the U.S.-backed Lon Nol government against the North Vietnamese-supported Khmer Rouge.

A number of journalists were known to have been captured by the Khmer Rouge and probably executed.

U.S. Embassy spokesman John Johnson said that Australian David MacMillan and Briton Keith Rotheram handed over the remains Friday, and they were sent to the Hawaii-based Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, or JPAC, which deals with accounting for missing Americans from past wars.

"Obviously there is nothing conclusive and tests need to be conducted," Johnson said. "Each case is different so it is difficult to speculate on how long the analysis may take."

The search for Sean Flynn and a close friend, Dana Stone, began not long after their disappearance in the province of Kampong Cham in 1970, notably by a colleague and Vietnam War-era photographer Tim Page.

Freelance "bone hunters" have also taken up the search for both missing journalists and U.S. servicemen listed as missing in Indochina. Some proved to be swindlers who demanded money from grieving families of the missing.

"Over the years a number of us have tried to resolve the fate of our mates. Not only have fellow media been on this quest, but officials from the U.S., Japan and France," Page wrote in an e-mail to friends last week.

Page, who urged the duo to turn over the remains to U.S. authorities, also expressed concern over how MacMillan and Rotheram allegedly conducted their search.

"It was not a forensic dig: They used an excavator and uncovered a full set of remains, which they removed from the site," Page said. He noted that nine foreigners, mostly journalists, were thought to have been held in the same area as the excavation at the time of Flynn's disappearance.

Page said the MacMillan and Rotheram excavation was carried out in March while in January, JPAC conducted an excavation in the same province in search of a U.S. pilot who was shot down and then killed, according to Um Sam An, a senior provincial police official.

Flynn, an actor who turned to photojournalism, covered the wars in Vietnam and Cambodia before his capture at the age of 28. Several documentary films and books, including "Two of the Missing," have appeared about Flynn and colleagues who suffered the same fate.

His Australian-born father was a leading star in romantic and swashbuckling films of the 1930s.

Associated Press writer Denis D. Gray in Bangkok contributed to this report.

Queensland adventurers claim to find remains of Sean Flynn in Cambodia

ADVENTROUS SPIRIT: Sean Flynn in Vietnam in the late 1960s. (Picture: Tim Page, The Courier-Mail)

March 29, 2010
By Sophie Elsworth
The Courier-Mail (Australia)

TWO Queensland adventurers think they have found the remains of Sean Flynn, the dashing son of screen legend Errol Flynn.

Flynn's disappearance during the Vietnam War in 1970 prompted an international mystery spanning 40 years.

David MacMillan, 29, and Keith Rotheram, 60, went to Cambodia on a search partly funded by the Flynn family.

They have spent four months digging in a remote north-eastern pocket of Cambodia after a local – who has since died – informed them of nearby wartime executions.

"I've been on an expedition there for four months, I had hand digging crews, we just dug hole after hole and we slit trench after trench," Mr MacMillan said yesterday.

"We found human remains and a jaw bone."

On March 14, the pair discovered four well-preserved teeth, two of them still bright white.

The remains have been flown to the US where DNA tests will be performed and checked against Flynn's dental records.

He was known for his excellent teeth and Mr MacMillan, a Nambour-born graphic designer who lives in Vietnam, said an expert who studied photographs of the remains said they showed signs of dental work done in the US when Flynn was a budding actor.

Flynn was working as a photojournalist for Time magazine when he disappeared along with another US journalist on April 6, 1970.

Many attempts were made to find the 28-year-old but proved unsuccessful.

Mr Rotheram, from the Gold Coast, said the findings were part of an "adventure of the decade".

"It's the greatest mystery of the world. Where is Sean Flynn? We were making a documentary on the final search for Sean Flynn," he said.

"In our opinion, we have a 50 per cent chance of it being the remains of Sean Flynn."

The pair worked in 45C heat using hand shovels before opting for a much easier method.

"We went about it the Gold Coast way, I went in there with a bobcat," he said.

"By hand, we spent weeks and weeks and weeks, but by backhoe it took us about an hour-and-a-half before we found something.

"It's right in the middle of nowhere, you had to know where you were digging or you had no chance."

Flynn's 53-year-old sister, Rory, has written of her relief over the find in an email.

"I grew up with Sean and also named my son after him, so we have hoped and prayed that his remains would be found," she wrote.

"Information came to me in the past year that motivated this private search and we hope that the person found is my brother so that he can finally come home."

One early theory claimed Flynn was executed by lethal injection.

A witness who helped Mr MacMillan and Mr Rotheram described a Westerner matching Sean Flynn's description being executed in 1971.

The witness said the man was forced to dig his own grave and then was battered to death with a rock after his executioner's gun jammed as he tried to shoot his victim in the back of the head. Other finds include clothes, and jungle vines used to tie up a prisoner.

It is believed Flynn was executed by brutal rebel soldiers belonging to Cambodia's Khmer Rouge.

His grieving mother, Lili Damita, Errol Flynn's first wife, spent huge sums on failed expeditions to find Sean before she died in 1994.

He was the image of his movie idol father, the star of films such as The Adventures Of Robin Hood and Captain Blood.

Additional reporting Daily Mail

Remembering Robert Novak

Robert Novak delivers remarks during the Young America's Foundation's National Conservative Student Conference in this Aug. 3st, 2005 file photo at George Washington University, Washington, DC. (AFP/Tim Sloan)

2009-08-19
Dan Southerland, Executive Editor
Radio Free Asia

Conservative columnist Robert Novak passed away on Aug. 18. He was 78. RFA Executive Editor Dan Southerland tells the story of a dangerous road trip with the famous commentator at the outset of the war in Cambodia in 1970.

I had several brief encounters over the years with Robert Novak, the influential conservative political columnist who died Aug. 18. But the most memorable took place in wartime Cambodia.

As I embarked on a trip with Novak into eastern Cambodia in April 1970, my expectations were not high.

As a correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor I had already met a few visiting columnists and other luminaries who came on brief trips to Vietnam. They had their views fixed and stories written before they arrived, as far as I could tell.

In Vietnam, U.S. military officers briefed and escorted them around. Indeed, Novak himself acknowledged that the U.S. authorities “did their best to make life easy” for him in Vietnam.

But Novak surprised me. In Cambodia at that point, there were no U.S. officers, helicopters, or airplanes to shuttle us around. The only way to find the war was to take to the roads and do basic reporting.

Novak knew how to do that. He had once reported for a wire service in the 1950s, which was the best basic training that you could get in the news business at the time.

Prince of Darkness

Novak went on the embrace the nickname “Prince of Darkness.” Colleagues said it derived from his dour visage and professed pessimism.

In Phnom Penh, Novak linked up with Jim Wallace, a correspondent with U.S. News & World Report and the two invited me to join them on a road trip into an area near the Vietnam border called the Parrot’s Beak. This was the center of the action in Cambodia at that early stage of the war.

Following the overthrow of Cambodia’s Prince Norodom Sihanouk in March 1970, North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops began attacking the ill-prepared Cambodian army outside villages and towns just inside the Cambodian border.

A Cambodian spokesman in Phnom Penh was claiming glorious victories over the North Vietnamese, but as Novak and the rest of us realized, this was “pure fiction.”

In his autobiography, The Prince of Darkness, Novak described the situation: “American reporters, usually in groups of two or three, would hire a car with driver and interpreter at a daily rate of ten dollars in town and twenty-five dollars in the countryside (with a premium of one hundred dollars if shot at).”

Air-conditioned Mercedes had all been taken by other reporters by the time Wallace got to town. He was only able to procure “a timeworn four-door Chevrolet Impala…”

“When we reached the Neak Leung ferry station on the Mekong an hour out of Phnom Penh, there was a line of Mercedes sedans carrying reporters, immobilized by what they saw….,” Novak recalled.

“We saw an endless procession of dead bodies…floating down the river. We thus learned of a genocidal slaughter in process. The dead were ethnic Vietnamese, not invading troops but civilian residents, some of whom had lived in Cambodia for generations and now had been slaughtered by their fellow Cambodians, ethnic Khmer, and dumped in the river….”

“The Lon Nol government had been exhorting the populace to patriotic fervor against Communist Vietnamese troops” and had unleashed ethnic hatred against all Vietnamese.

Map of Cambodia and Vietnam showing the area called the "Parrot's Beak", a chunk of Cambodia protruding in the neighboring country. (RFA Graphic)

Danger on the road

In the Parrot’s Beak, at the provincial capital of Svay Rieng, we located a Cambodian army brigade whose troops appeared to be nearly encircled by the Viet Cong.

We were told to wait till the brigade’s commander finished his daily nap. After considerable delay, we found the colonel wearing a silk dressing gown and offering us cognac. He launched into a monologue laced with fantasies about easily defeating the Viet Cong.

By this time, Novak wrote in his autobiography, “Wallace, Southerland, and I were in nearly as much danger as the colonel.”

We had wasted so much time at the brigade headquarters that night was falling with miles to go before we regained Phnom Penh.

At one point, we heard automatic weapons fire. Wallace shouted to the driver to accelerate, and we sped out of danger.

But at Neak Leung, we found the ferryboat tied up. The only person around was a boy who told us the ferryman had gone home. The boy took off running.

Our driver began to sob. We faced a night without lodging and the possibility that hostile guerrillas would find us.

“Then out of the darkness, we heard truck engines,” Novak recalled. “Guerrillas don’t travel by truck. It was a Cambodian Army company, with the ferryman in tow. It might as well have been the U.S. Cavalry to the rescue as they carried us across the Mekong.”

The last time I saw Novak was in May 2006 at a media conference in Florida held on an estate that included an open-air zoo.

Novak and a few of us visited the zoo during a break from the conference, where Novak was the keynote speaker.

We were offered a chance to stick our hands through a wire fence and pet a cheetah. I declined to do so. Novak reached in a patted the cheetah.

The big cat purred.